Things are looking up for the Mac

Courtesy of the Associated Press, a report that sales of Apple Inc.'s flagship product, its Macintosh computers (not the iPod, despite what the hype may have led you to believe), are on the upswing, in large part thanks to the taste of Apple quality and ease of use people who normally use Wintel boxen are getting from the iPod and iTunes for Windows, plus the ability of Macs with Intel chips to boot both Mac OS X and Windows systems—something nobody on the Wintel side is offering at all—and the highly praised experience provided by Apple's retail stores, which were initially criticized as a slap in the face to retailers in its long-established reseller channel. Read all about it here. (And Unca Steve's keynote speech at today's opening session of the Worldwide Developer's Conference, where he is expected to show off the nearly-final Leopard version of Mac OS X, is liable to kick things up still another notch.)

Now, I know this is going to stick in the craw of certain people on my f-list (yes, Filk Daddy, I'm looking at you) who believe that monopoly is bad and open-source software is better for the user's freedom to control their own computer. And I'm not knocking Linux/Ubuntu in the least. But there is something to be said for hardware and software that is designed in one place, with tight integration and the kind of quality control a global community of idiosyncratic user-programmers simply can't match. (One calls to mind the old saw about a camel being a horse designed by a committee.) Varying opinions welcome.